When I changed the theme for this site to the Twenty Twenty-Five Block theme, I commented that Full Site Editing (FSE) was a maze of complexity. Now that I have had a bit more experience and the benefit of help from a Happiness Engineer, it is beginning to resolve into something I can work with.
Just to take a step back, Matt Mullenweg of Automattic said probably two or three years ago now, that in order to keep WordPress relevant it had to give everyone the ability to change everything on a site. Failing that, he said, then WordPress would lose ground because not everyone could write the PHP code needed to make changes.
Several times on the journey from there to here I doubted whether he could pull it off no matter how many technically proficient people joined in to make it happen.
And I don’t think it is there yet. And I have been messing around with WP for a while.
The problem started when I wanted to add a search box at the bottom of the page. Which page? Which template? I added it and it wasn’t showing. Where had I even added it? So I asked and with the benefit of the advice of the person who guided me. After half an hour it started to seem possible to work with FSE.
After managing to add a search box in the homepage, today I wanted to add the same box to every post. I didn’t want to force my visitors to return to the home page to search for something on the site. They should be able to do that when they are in an article.
So I added it today and it really was simple with copy paste into the single posts template.
There are still some rough edges on this site. I changed the size of the body text and the text is not the same size everywhere – the anchor text for links is bigger than normal text. But now I think I can find where to change it without feeling I am standing on the high diving board staring at an unknown sea of confusion.
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